


a book on war

by gogollescent



Category: Gunnerkrigg Court
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 03:13:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/819304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annie, in the forest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a book on war

For the first few weeks Annie still clings to delusions of hygiene, and sometimes is so conscious of her skin—the rind of sweat, the sticking density of uncombed hair—that she thinks wistfully of a fire. Hot water, that’s all she wants; hot water and a place to stand that isn’t crawling with semianimate dust. But there are no fires in the forest except the ones that spring up after lightning, and her host family, technologically adept in many ways, pull faces when she brings it up: they assure her that she smells lovely, like rotting oak, and won’t she have another gilled mushroom? Hahaha! Once her stomach gets used to raw fungi and little berries like jewels, the food is only terrible, but she remains wary about things directly offered. The Anwyn’s sense of fun favors laxatives over jokes.

Instead she resorts to the river. Not  _the_ river, but a tributary that winds west through the beech groves, white-foamed and musical. She’s always surprised by how much light gets in through the canopy, although the water under the bubbles is dark, and stains her skin faintly gray, ripping away the dust only to deposit a layer of scum. She puts her feet in it, and then her forearms. She rests her hands open-palmed on the rocks.

“Fire head girl,” says Coyote, dropping down from a tree branch, “what are you doing?”

She hasn’t seen him since the day he proposed she stay the summer. She hasn’t forgotten, however, the way he slinks, and now he rushes across the bank low and slender as an anaconda out of its element. His head is massive; the rest of him dwindles. He sets his jaw on her bent knee and the weight pins her skinny thigh to stone. She experiences a wave of gratitude for Khepi’s horrible leggings, lent to her after her stockings disintegrated from damp.

“Hello Coyote.”

“Hello, hello,” he says, the long chin grinding down on her patella. “Are you washing? Be careful! You know what they say about cleanliness.”

“Well,” she says, “I am next to you.”

He laughs so hard he almost blows her into the stream, great gusts of amusement that incidentally puff him up to loom like the early onset of night. If it weren’t for his muzzle holding her down, she would be halfway to the waterfall; as it is her hair has come loose from its ties and covers her face like a shroud. “Ggggnnn,” she says, and he does knock her in then, lifting his nose just enough to bat her off her perch. It’s not so cold, three months since snowmelt, but she comes up numb and deadened as though someone cauterized her brain.

“Wake up,” says Coyote, staring at her dog-solemn down the length of his muzzle.

“I wasn’t asleep,” she says. She spits out a weed.

“And now you’re here,” says Coyote. “How happy that makes me. How pleased we are to have you. Come out, come out! Have you spoken to Ysengrin? Has he showed you the sights?”

“Every day,” says Annie, “and—well—” She shivers. “Sometimes he tells me stories.” She climbs out of the stream, which seems to grow shallower as she leaves it, until she’s sprawled on the bank and her heels are sticking up out of the eddies, her feet longer than the bed is deep. Reeds nudge her ankles. “This great battle happened here centuries ago, no sign of it remaining because even the ribcages have been carried off by thieves. Things like that.”

“Stupid old fool,” says Coyote. He prowls around her shoulders and comes to a halt with his paws clasping her head, balanced like a seal with a ball. His tongue flicks out once to wipe a daub of mud from her forehead; she only feels it once it’s gone. “Well, well, and what other stories are there, indeed! But you must be terribly bored.”

Her hair falls forward again, drenched to deciduous crimson, and unseeing she tries to sit up. “Lie down,” he murmurs into her hair. “I can educate you myself.”

She sneezes. “I’m not sure I’m ready to move things in the ether today.”

“Hahaha,” says Coyote, “but you already have! Me! I came here for you. Just think of that.” He snuffs suddenly down the back of her head to her prickling nape, as though following the scent of the spine beneath. There’s a feeling there, like flayed bone. Where his wet nostrils pass it intensifies in a brief flash of pain and goes. Gently he finishes his perusal of her neck and raises her by the scruff, his teeth rounded and warm as ivory held for a while in the hand, until she’s sitting half-slumped against his breast, and he wraps one forelimb over her shoulders like a mantle. His form engulfs her. “Aren’t you homesick?” he asks, but smelling herself she can find no whiff of sterility, no real cleansing, and the hospital is so far away it might be nothing; the darkness of a haunted classroom, and her mother’s cot on the night she died, all unreachable. “No,” she says, accepting the stink of his breath. He’s soft, impenetrable: a living abyss. “What’s the lesson plan?”

“This,” he says, and tells her a story about a spider who married for love. Halfway through it becomes the story of how the spider captured a snake, a cat, a hornet, and a girl; then a story about stories unleashed from the sky. It’s better than Ysengrin’s tour guiding, but not as much as he thinks: Annie drifts off, halfway through, and Coyote curls along the margin of her dreams. His eye, white as a pearl in a reef. “Why did you come here?” she asks, asleep, “We don’t have anything bigger than badgers,” and he whirls and blurs. No wolves, either, in England; Ysengrin and her doll, that’s it. Foxes, still, but for how long? Coyote hacks up a star.

When she wakes up she is freezing and flat on her back. Mud hugs her legs. Ysengrin is standing over her, looking as worried as his expressionless animal face will allow, the little green eyes luminous.

“You are a strange and silly girl,” he tells her.

The funny thing is, she can’t feel the grime any longer. She supposes she’s gotten used to it.


End file.
